How do you find a company on a map?
A Chinese company’s physical address and location remains an important piece of information that can help you cross-check and verify that it is a legitimate business.
While not common, some Chinese companies provide false information about their physical locations to mask their true operational identities or to portray themselves as something they’re not. Verifying this piece of information is a critical step in your research and due diligence work.
While this may sound like an obvious question with a straight-forward answer, finding the exact location and address of a Chinese company can prove tricky. Knowing where the physical location of the building (or buildings) that the Chinese company claims to operate is an important piece of information that can help you further verify the legitimacy (and accuracy) of the company with which you are planning to do business. For example, if a company says it operates a factory, you’ll want to verify that it has a physical location where it manufactures its goods and materials.
The obvious place to start is a search using Google Maps, but often times satellite and street-level images are unavailable in certain areas. There are other services such as Harris Geospatial Solutions (providing satellite imagery services), Zoom Earth, and Google Earth. The Chinese-language service application, Baidu Maps is provided through Baidu, the Chinese technology service provider.
Once you’ve located the company via one of the service providers above, you’ll want to cross-check the address that the Chinese company gave you matches the information you’ve found on its location. Discrepancies between the two pieces of data could be an indicator of fraud as it is trying to represent itself as something it is not.
Additional Resources
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